I agree with the reviewer--I'm two thirds of the way through the Notebook and it's a wonderful read. I hope it won't be Clive's last book of criticism, but if so, what an excellent final bow. It shows that his critical powers and ability to turn a sparkling phrase remain undimmed by illness. And it's also reinvigorated my flagging interest in modern poetry.

The great critic champions the poems that have given him most pleasure in this provocative collection of essays

Kate Kellaway

Sunday 15 February 2015 14.00 GMT

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Clive James is never po-faced about poetry. He writes with the buoyant, aphoristic panache that made his career and with a judgment refined by a lifetime of reading and thinking about poetry – and writing it (he has a new collection coming out this April). This sympathetic, absorbing and provocative book is a miscellany – most of its articles written for Chicago’s Poetry magazine. But there are unifying thoughts. One is that “poetry” is not what excites him – too baggy a word and covering a multitude of sins – it is the particular poem that matters, the hardest thing to write. He argues that we are living in a time when “almost everyone writes poetry but scarcely anyone can write a poem”. He is on the side of clarity (he hopes it is “forgivable to favour those poets who show signs of knowing what they are saying”) while noting how complicated simplicity can be.

Clive James at his home in Cambridge, England, in 2012.Hazel Thompson / The New York Times

Saul Austerlitz April 9, 2015 Updated: April 9, 2015 03:51 PM

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Clive James makes it all seem easy. His 2007 treasure trove of 20th-century history and art, Cultural Amnesia – an absolute must for any learned reader’s bookshelf – made the prospect of picking up a dictionary and absent-mindedly learning German while paging through a collection of Rainer Maria Rilke’s essays sound delightful, and more improbably, manageable.

I eventually lost track of the number of times in James’s slim new volume of essays, Poetry Notebook, that the author casually mentioned memorising lines, stanzas, whole poems. James makes poetry sound like a slice of chocolate cake, casually nibbled at until the whole has been consumed. “He can get a whole poem in your head,” he mentions about reading Frost. For a brief moment, I almost saw myself dipping into Frost’s collected work and memorising a few choice poems, until I awoke with a start and remembered that James had played this trick on me before. As he remarks of Auden in one of the essays here: “It seemed so effortless. And so it was, but only for him.”

April is Poetry Month—and a good time to celebrate one of our finest exponents of strict form, elegant diction and clear thought.

By Adam Kirsch April 16, 2015 6:58 p.m. ET

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Clive James has excelled at many trades during his long career—critic, memoirist, television presenter—but his first and longest-lasting love has been writing poetry. His poems enjoy a high reputation with readers who value strict form, elegant diction and clear thought, and his delightful exercise in spite, “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered,” has a kind of cult status among writers. Now, as he nears the end of his career—he has spoken publicly about his recent diagnosis of leukemia and the prospect of death—Mr. James has condensed the wisdom earned over a lifetime of reading and writing poetry into “Poetry Notebook.”

Jonny Greenwood: ‘Clive James has given me the further education I missed when I dropped out [of university] at 19.’ Photograph: Edu Hawkins/Redferns via Getty Images

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2 | Book Clive James: Poetry Notebook 2006-2014I owe so much to Clive James. He’s led me to most of my favourite writers and poets – and frankly, he’s given me the further education I missed when I dropped out [of university] at 19. He also makes me delight more than any other writer – so effortlessly lucid, amusing and learned – often in the same sentence. It must be hard to write like him, but all the effort is hidden under the hood: the effect is prose that purrs, never rattles. I’ve devoured all his essays, and learned from this particular collection of essays about much more than poetry (especially through his criticism of Ezra Pound, which I was glad to apply to lot s of avant-garde music).